amercia!

alright so everyone should go look at this haha but skip to minute 5. that's where it gets wonderful. this absolutely brilliant and hilarious. the national anthem is the best. please remove your shoe and place your hand on your appendix with me :)

oh how time flies

I'VE BEEN GRADUATED FOR A YEAR! how flippin weird is that thought?? it just hit me when i was going though all the pictures on facebook. it is so unbelievable to me! i feel almost old haha. it is just so weird to think that a year ago i had just graduated and how much i have grown and changed since then! i kind of what to write it all out but i know i will leave stuff out. hmm let's see... well i met a whole bunch of new people that i love with all my heart last summer. they accepted me without even a second thought and i am so grateful for them. i miss last summer and how easy everything was and the people that were my life back then that no longer even a part. i worked at costa vita for a while and furthered my dislike for working with food. i learned to love working out. i learned how to get along better with my family. i got in a huge fight with my best friend that i will always regret even though we are good now. i came up to BYUI and had an extremely emotionally rough semester where i lost over 30 pounds because i stopped eating. i made friends with some amazing friends especially current roommates who will forever be part of my life. i grew so much closer to my little sister and a lot closer to the rest of my family and no longer fight with them on everything. i moved back to IF and the first two months were hell. everything i had hoped for happened but it wasn't the right path for my life and it was really hard on me. i had to learn how to work through things i never had before. i learned who my true friends are. oh i almost forgot. i dated one of the most amazing guy/friends i will ever have. because we dated, we are no longer friends which is something i still have a hard time with. i worked at zurchers and learned a ton about how crazy ladies are but also how to be in a position of management. i definitely went a little crazy haha and loved every second of it. now i'm up at BYUI again for my second semester trying to decide where i should go next. i am completely different person then i was last year and i don't regret any part of it. i am so grateful for my experiences, friends, the fact that i have crazy opinions, and i know who i am. it has been an extremely crazy rough year on me and i wouldn't have ever imagined any of it but i am so unbelievably proud to say that i am so much stronger than i have even been and ever thought i would be in my entire life. i cannot wait to see where i will be this time next year because honestly i never know what my life will throw at me next! :)

Why are we ok? - an essay for FDENG201

Why are we ok?

            One of the observations that was made by a classmate was that when a person is asked how they are, they almost instinctively respond with being good, fine, or ok. It is never anything different. This really made me think. I started trying to notice how often I would say the same. Turns out, it was almost every single time. I feel almost as if society expects us to be ok and nothing less. It made me wonder why unhappiness is unacceptable and how this affects each of us.

A couple of weeks ago I had a thought when I was on a run and thinking about this essay. The main question I was thinking about is what does it take for a person to be truly happy? This has actually been on my mind the entire semester because I don’t feel like I am happy being here. I’ve been trying to figure out what I need to do in order to be in the state of mind I want to be. I felt like in almost all of my classes, they were all talking about the same thing; making the conscious decision to be happy no matter what. I still felt like something was missing from this though. After being instructed to try to further observe the world around me, I didn’t really find anything that I felt was life changing. One of my classmates shared that she had noticed that people always say that they are ok when asked how they are. This hit something in me. I began to really think about it. I kept thinking that in order for a person to be truly happy, they have to first be truly happy with not being happy.

I feel like every time I try to figure out where my life is going and where I would like it to go, I always have to think of will it make me happy instantly. In today’s world, we want everything right now. We don’t want to have to go through anything in order to get what we want. I also feel like society expects me to be completely happy with everything in life. I’ve always been that girl who has had a smile on her face because I had a pretty easy life. Three years ago that all changed. I had an experience that created a change in me forever. I was no longer that same girl but I was expected to be that person still. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be not ok. It took me forever to accept how much I had changed and I am still struggling with it today. I feel almost as if because I had continued on with life like nothing had happened when I really just needed to face it, it made it all worse. It continued to spiral out of control until I finally began to get a grip on it. I didn’t try to deal with it until it had affected me so much. I feel like so many people in society try to just push through any issue that comes their way. To me this is not a good way to deal with anything. I believe that we need to actually take the time to think about the hard times in life and take the time to grasp them. In today’s world however we have to always be happy. No matter how great of an issue we have, we are expected to put a smile on our faces and act like it never happened.

I brought my thought to the most open and social place I know of; Facebook. I asked everyone if they thought in order to be truly happy, they had to first be happy with not being ok. I got a couple of very interesting thoughts. A common opinion was that you have to first be ok with where you are at in life and then happiness will come. We cannot be worried about trying to always be happy. Not everything in life can be perfect at all times. It just isn’t the way it is supposed to be. We are supposed to go through trials and hard times in our life because that is what shapes our lives. It molds us into the person we are supposed to become. In order to for us to learn from these hard times though we have to accept the fact that they are there and they will help us grow. We have to learn from the hard times in order to become stronger.

I do believe with all my heart that happiness is a decision though. One of my favorite quotes is by Henry Ward Beecher. It says “The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.” It is each and every one person on this Earth’s decision on whether they want to be happy. There are so many stories of people that have such horrible lives but yet they are so unbelievably happy. One of my favorite things in this world is to watch videos of African children just dancing and singing. They are so simply happy yet compared to my life, they have nothing. They have come to just love the life they have been given. I feel like because their lives are so much more simple and less complicated, they don’t have to worry about the unimportant things in life that tend to cloud our lives. I need to learn how to make my life simpler and just focus on what makes me happy. I’ve lived 18 almost 19 years of life and I definitely know what makes me happy. I just let other things cloud that happiness.

It is a delicate balance to figure out the line between accepting unhappiness in order to let it change you and making the conscious effort to find happiness in everyday life. I believe that is one of our greatest struggles in life. My main goal is to find that balance so that I can be happy no matter what I go through in life. I know that I will have to go through difficult times and that I need to be ok with that in order to take from it what I need. I don’t want to just be ok. I don’t want to be happy just because that is how society wants me to be but genuinely happy because I am.

so i was thinking...

something that has been on my mind recently for i don't know what reason has been all the guys going on missions. i don't think us girls realize how difficult this is. we just like to make sure they go and if they don't we're typically not ok with it. i just started thinking (since i'm almost 19) what if i was having to go through all of that. i know for a fact i wouldn't be able to do it for a number of reasons. it just put it into better perspective for me and really made me think.

also in my english class, i found my reason for why i blog in a perfect quote. "i am i plus my surroundings and if i do not preserve the latter, i do not preserve myself." -jose ortega y gasset
the reason for this blog is to remember things in my life. i try to just put the happy things but it's mostly just to preserve my thoughts and the things i do so i don't forget. i just really liked that quote though haha.

pondering on a mistake

guess what... i'm completely broke... haha and it sucks. i literally have around 200 dollars in my bank account and that is it. this is seriously way stressful to me! it just makes me think again that i really shouldn't have come to school this semester. so far, i have no motivation to be in school. i am having an alright time but not as much fun as i would like to be having. and in all honesty, i should have just listened to the few people that told me to go with what my heart was telling me to do. i didn't want to go to school because i really felt like it wasn't the right place for me to be and i still feel that way. nothing has changed. if i would have moved to st george instead of going to school, i could have bought a decent car, had my apartment and would be able to work in order to actually have money. i don't even know how i can afford to do anything next semester. actually i know for a fact that i can't. i am so broke. i feel like my only option is to stay at home and live and work there which i just don't feel like i can handle. i really feel like i need to go somewhere and just be able to experience the life i want to. i know that is what college is supposed to be like, but i never can feel like it really is. i know that the only reason i'm at this school is because it is what everyone does and because it was cheap. since when did i do what everyone else does? it's not really my thing. and i really do have such a hard time with some people here. i know it is a great school i just sometimes don't feel like it's a great school for me personally. anyways i really am starting to regret letting the decision get made for me that i needed to go to school. i should have stood my ground and done what i wanted. i would have been so much better off in so many ways. i honestly have no idea how anything is going to work out now and it is so stressful but theres nothing i can do but wait it out and let the punches roll. i know one thing for sure, it's not going to end well.

rough thoughts

so i for some reason am thinking about everything in my life today. i keep thinking about last year. i miss everyone so much. i miss the way things used to be. i miss the people in my life that really cared about me and that were always there for me. i miss being in IF. i miss feeling like i knew what i was doing in life and like i knew where i belonged. i cannot even begin to wrap my mind around how much everything has changed. i have no idea what to think anymore. i keep thinking about how i am not going to school next semester and how much that scares me but i really want to do it at the same time. i haven't ever had to experience a change that big so of course it scares me so much. it is definitely on my mind everyday. it influences almost every action i have. i don't want to get serious with anyone because i don't want to have to leave them. i know it is something i need to do. i just keep having this almost pain that makes me want everything back. but that's not life. i have to just keep moving forward and hoping for the best.